Safety-Critical Ethernet/AFDX

Technical Details

Safety-Critical Ethernet/AFDX

Technical Details

Besides portability, built-in BITE and MIB and available DO-178B certification artifacts, a minimized workload for a subsystem communicating through ARINC-664 Part 7 is another major advantage of the Safety-Critical Ethernet/AFDX solution.

Host Driver is layered for easy porting

High throughput and small footprint combined with easy portability was the design aim of the host driver. The result is a three layer architecture where only the very small Glue Layer has to be adapted when porting to another OS. The host driver API offers all functionality to easily configure the AFDX® Node. The BITE API is also incorporated in the driver API (see details at right). PikeOS drivers as well as LynxOS-178 and Linux drivers are available.

ICMP and SNMP reside on the Safety-Critical Ethernet Node

Because ICMP and SNMP both reside on the AFDX® Node, the host OS dependency is minimized. Having both services on the AFDX® Node also leaves more computing time for the host.

IM & RM

Integrity Management and Redundancy Management are basic components of the AFDX® Node. The Safety-Critical Ethernet/AFDX from SYSGO includes a comprehensive implementation of these components, guaranteeing impressive performance.

DO-178B Certification

All artifacts required to process a DO-178B certification are available. The currently available documents will cover a certification up to Level B.

Drivers available for PikeOS and LynxOS-178

Any other safety critical operating system can be easily adapted by SYSGO or the customer.

Configuration Service and MIB

The configuration service interprets the configuration information given by the host and takes all actions necessary to initialize the AFDX® Node as defined. The management information base is responsible for storing information about network packet errors to ease in-flight and in-shop maintenance.

Debug and Trace possibilities

The AFDX® Node is also available as an instrumented version, incorporating a debug stub and tracing capability. This enables the use of standard software development environments (IDEs) as well as checking the timing behavior without requiring the use of costly hardware analyzers.

Reference implementation on different platforms

Reference implementations are available for different airborne proven PowerPC products, including PowerQUICC II, MPC5554 and now QorIQ P2020.

100 % AFDX® performance

Safety-Critical Ethernet/AFDX from SYSGO offers 100 % AFDX® performance. The performance calculation is based on the AFDX® performance specification.